There's a lot of talk about quality of life - what it is,
how you get it, what you need to be able to sustain it, how much it
costs, whether or not you have to wait until retirement to enjoy it,
what happens to it if you can't afford to retire, etc. If
you have it that you wait until retirement to enjoy it but you can't
afford to retire, it implies quality of life is simply a function of an
IRA or a 401(k). We all know it's not. So what then
is quality of life a function of?

Sir Paul McCartney

If you talk with people who've made it in life, people
who've accumulated great wealth, people who've amassed many
possessions, people who are afforded great
fame,
you'll often find
for them it's not enough. And it's not just that it's not
enough for them. On top of it's not enough
comes the galling realization it was supposed to be
enough. And it isn't. So there's a sense of being cheated as well.

Sir Paul McCartney, a billion and a half dollars of net worth
fortune later, has
famously
and endearingly observed one thing he's ongoingly afraid of is
waking up one day finding himself poor. It doesn't matter that it's
a billion and half dollars later. It doesn't matter that it's fifty
years later. It makes no difference that his is arguably the most
widely recognized and loved face and name on
the planet.
The same sense of being poor in Liverpool is still there, still
haunting him. The quality of life afforded by wealth
is hopelessly and constantly undermined by tiny termites from the
past boring the foundations of life now and for the foreseeable
future.

Citizen Kane - The Movie

In Citizen Kane, considered by many to be the most
innovative Hollywood movie of all time, and often assumed to be a
veiled portrayal of the life of William Randolph Hearst, the
protagonist Charles Foster Kane is dying. Yet after a life of
Croesian riches, none of anything his enormous wealth
and fortune have afforded him has been enough. All he wants is his
childhood toy, his sled, his
"Rosebud".

Where we've got it all wrong, where we approach quality of life
ass backwards is we go into life to
achieve quality of life, to attain
quality of life. We literally go into life to make it
ie to make quality of life. If only we do the right thing, if only
we do something that makes us happy, that's when we'll
have quality of life. If only we get the right job, if only we make
enough
money,
that's when we'll have quality of life. If only we
meet the right person, if only we find our soul mate,
that's when we'll have quality of life. We
know it's out there. We just have to make
it and then we'll have it. In this regard, we're
irrepressible (if not naïve) optimists. "With all this
manure, there must be a pony in here somewhere!". But there
isn't. And there never was to begin with. "With all this manure,
there must be a pony in here somewhere!" pertinently enunciates the
domain of hope. Hope is really, if you examine it closely,
hope-less. Built in to hope is always the roots of
hopelessness, frustration, and failure. To hope is
eloquent testimony to hopelessness. "The hand" implies
both the front of the hand and the back
of the hand.

To hope for quality of life is, like that, self-defeating.
But that's not to say there's no quality possible in life.
Whereas hope is, literally, hoped for (in other words,
contains the seeds of it's own worst fears), quality is always
available as a generated context. Quality of life is
brought to life. You bring quality to life.
There's no quality out there. There's none,
really! There's none for the taking. You can't make
it enough ever for life to return quality. You can't
hope for quality of life and have it appear. But you
can bring quality to life.

You could say, in a very real sense, that when you give up all
hope and start being responsible for generating
quality, only then have you truly grown up. You could also
say, in a very real sense, that when you're willing to be a source of
ie a speaker of quality through language, only then can you
truly lay claim to enlightenment. But that's another
conversation for another occasion.

What quality of life comes down to is a conversation. But not just any
conversation. Quality of life is presenced by a certain
kind of conversation. It's brought forth in your speaking.
Quality of life is a quality, a space, to
comefrom. And the mechanism, the implement, the blunt
instrument for bringing it forth into the world is
language ie conversation ie in your speaking. You
can always start a new conversation if you don't like the one you're
in.